Ghost Hunter

It’s getting pretty expensive for the family to keep up with her boyfriend’s Fu Manchu maintenance and Val is pretty upset that her flirty sister has been hitting on him. To solve both problems, she demands that he should go out and get a job… but he can’t do anything conventional like being a businessman. And besides, can you imagine this guy answering the door when you call the cops if he joins the force? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Claymore Chaos… !

We suspect that’s not his real name.

Claymore checks around in his newspaper and decides that being a ghost hunter is, obviously, the way to go. Claymore could have gone to the science lab instead, but he has sirophobia, so that isn’t a good idea. Either way, like his housemates, there is no headquarters building for his new profession.

Also like his housemates, when his work hours come around—and he’s got third-shift hours, unlike each of the other professions, which is fine by him—he gets alerted in the message center that he has a few contracts to fulfill. As always, Claymore can ignore this, but he’s paid per-job as well as weekly, and every dollar counts. His first contract is a simple investigation at the Prudence household, as they’re overrun by spirits and not too happy about it. Claymore hops on his hog (yes, he has a motorcycle, because he’s that awesome) and heads on over.

Claymore arrives to the house presently, and things work sort of like Samson Schultz’s firefighting career: Claymore enters the house, and he spots a few spooky colored blobs that are randomly around. Now, the moment Claymore joined his profession, he got a free spirit sucker gun that allows him to interact with these translucent bastards. It’s not in his inventory, but that doesn’t matter: Claymore finds a cute green spirit on the first floor, interacts with it, and chooses the “Banish” command.

After a few seconds, he captures the spirit, and that does enter into his inventory. There, he can see that the spirit is a jealous type, a young one, and worth $200. Well, that’s certainly useful, isn’t it? I guess you really can put a price tag on life.

Claymore has to reissue the “Banish” command for each spirit he sees. Shortly, the house is cleared of the trio of spirits. While Claymore could immediately just sell them, he opts to leave immediately and head to the next house. There, Claymore runs into a minor issue: we’ve got five spirits, and they don’t want to stay in one spot. Claymore rolls with it though: I give the “Banish” command over each spirit, and Claymore will just walk over to each one in turn. The process is pretty automated, for better or worse: once I give the commands, I can just sit back and watch.

At Claymore’s third contract, things are more annoying still because it’s a two-story house and the spirits are fairly spread out. However, we can cheat a bit here. First, I pause the game, then worry about selecting the “Banish” command: this is basically a Sims 101 technique, obviously, but it’s good to remember anyway. Second, you know how with social commands, the target

Sim just stands there and waits once the command is engaged? That’s the way the spirits work too: as soon as Claymore starts walking toward his target, that spirit will just stand there and wait. If things get hectic, I can control things a bit better this way so Claymore completely lose his mind and just make himself at home.

Once Claymore finishes his third contract, the value of almost all his spirits drop significantly. The value decay is pretty extreme, so if you want to sell them, it’s best to do so immediately. While he could just straight sell the spirits through his inventory, Claymore decides to head to the science lab. He uses a building command called “Sell Spirits for Scientific Advancement.” This causes a popup box where he can select which, or even all, of his inventoried spirits.

For now, Claymore sells everything, making almost $1000 from it. Ghost Hunter is, clearly, the most lucrative profession. Though the Carwin family doesn’t need the huge amount of cash, it’s good to know for other Generation-1 families that don’t have two other working family members though: you can quickly upgrade your furniture and other objects to very respectable levels very quickly.

Anyway, Claymore goes home and uses his new cash to buy a telescope. One of the three responsibilities of being a Ghost Hunter is to work on your Logic skill, and Claymore wants to get promoted as quickly as possible.

Between working on Logic and taking every contract, Claymore amazingly gets promoted all the way to Level 5 in a matter of days. At that point, he gets a new tool in his arsenal (again, it’s invisible to his inventory) that allows him to exorcise demons from objects. Arriving at the Castor house, he spots several objects that are floating above the ground and have a spooky green light emanating from them.

Unlike previous spirit contracts, the AI actually wants to help out here. This means if you can get your Ghost Hunter to Level 5, you can automate his actions and work on other family members as well. If you wish to do things manually, as I’m doing here, just click the offending possessed object and select the “Exorcise” command.

Claymore exorcises the spirit in the couch, and then he just stands there like an idiot. Sadly, this means I need to give each “Exorcise” command for each object, but I can cue them all up and do something else, or again just leave it to the AI.

All of the poltergeists he exorcised count as spirits, and wind up going into his inventory with an attached value. These, like his previous spirits, he sells to the science lab to get some cash and help out with a Wish.

At this level, Claymore also receives a spirit scanner. He can use the special command “Scan For Spirits” by clicking the ground anywhere, and he’ll scan the lot. If he finds any spirits at all, he’ll get a single dollar for every spirit he finds, and then the spirits will automatically disappear. This means that scanning a lot will usually result in nothing more than some pocket change. You can only scan a lot at night, and usually simply isn’t worth it. I mean, if you’re at a point where $25 is making the difference between life and death, selling an unimportant object in Buy Mode is usually a better, quicker solution. Still, sometimes visiting a client’s home will not reveal any ghosts until you scan for them.

The real benefit to scanning for spirits is to scan for them in community lots. Not only will a positive scan get you some money, but some spirits may appear after the scan, spirits you can suck up in your little gun. Claymore finds a few in the park, and rather than selling them, he actually takes one home.

Claymore places his new spirit on the coffee table, and can name it. Its default name is Tabitha, so Claymore goes with that. Sadly, there’s not much more for the spirit to do, other than to be a centerpiece. Claymore keeps it (or “her” I guess) for a couple days, then interacts with it and uses the “Release” command. The spirit leaves, and Claymore gets nothing for kindness. That’s the circle of life, isn’t it?

By the time Claymore gets another ghost hunting contract, he’s up to Level 7. His next contract deals with actual ghosts this time: three ghosts (that is, ghost Sims) have invaded a house, and he needs to repel the invaders. Like his other contracts, all Claymore needs to do is find a ghost, then interact with it. Unlike the other contracts, he has a few ways he can deal with them.

First, these ghosts are Sims. That means Claymore can talk to the ghosts, or even go all the way up and start making out with or woo hooing them. Claymore prefers the hot flesh and bone of Valerie though, and chooses not to pursue this route, though he can just do friendly conversations. If he manages to get really friendly with a ghost in a short amount of time—which would be bolstered and easily possible with a high level of the Charisma skill—he could use a special social command called “Convince to Move On.” If this action passes, the ghost will indeed leave peacefully without incident.

Claymore’s Charisma skill is respectable at Level 3, but it’s not quite high enough to deal with trying to be friendly with all three invaders in a short time. Instead, Claymore just goes with the special “Banish with Banshee Banisher” command, and essentially treats the ghosts like the little baby spirits from his first set of contracts.

Claymore doesn’t get to keep these ghosts, but fulfilling the contract earns him a promotion. Hitting Level 8 gives him an upgraded Banshee Banisher, which lets him banish spirits and ghosts a lot faster.

Level 10 comes pretty quickly. Claymore’s reward for hitting the top of his career track is called the Spirit Positioning Device, which actually does appear in his inventory. When activated, it creates map tags all over the neighborhood in Map View. These show where every spirit is in the entire city at that moment, including the ones that are hidden and need to be scanned for. This way, Claymore can run around the whole city and suck in spirits on a whim, getting tons of cash in the process.

EditWhen I scan for spirits, it says there’s a dozen of them, but I can’t find them. Where are they?

When you use the “Scan for Spirits” command on the ground, your Sim will check the lot for spirits, but they won’t actually appear. Instead, the number that appears beside the little ghost picture is a count of how much money you earned for doing the scan. The money immediately goes into your family account, and then the ghosts you scanned magically disappear from the lot. You can only scan lots at night, and only once per night.